


Newton Geiszler: Doctor of the Great Unknown

by buckgaybarnes



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: (nothing more than verrrry light foreplay), ...except all fake!, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Fake Medium Newt, Flirting, Getting Back Together, Ghosts, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Ouija Boards, Spiritualism, seance, will i write more? probably!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 13:02:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18388949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckgaybarnes/pseuds/buckgaybarnes
Summary: “Have you come to expose me, then?” Newton says, sounding increasingly delighted with every word. “As the fraud I am? Put those great scientific powers to use on me?”Newton always had a dreadfully well-tuned ability to discern Hermann’s thought process during their correspondence; he has not lost it, it seems, even five years down the line. “Well,” Hermann says, “er, yes, I suppose—”(or: con artist newt-slash-professional debunker hermann)





	Newton Geiszler: Doctor of the Great Unknown

**Author's Note:**

> last weekend my sister and i watched a bunch of ghost movies set in the victorian period for some reason and it REALLY put me in the mood to write a classic con artist/debunker au. has this been done for newmann before? no clue. anyway i wrote this a week ago and decided to post now!

Hermann wasn’t shocked, somehow, to find out that this was how Dr. Geiszler spent the better part of the five years following the abrupt end of their acquaintance. This did not mean that he was not disappointed. Geiszler’s natural talent at the sciences, his myriad of skills, his brilliant mind—all of it wasted on mere… _parlor tricks_. More than that. They weren’t as innocent as that. Geiszler was no better than...well…

“You’re a _con artist_ ,” Hermann declares.

It wasn’t too hard to track Dr. Geiszler down. There aren’t many German-turned-American scholars-turned-spiritualists running about London, after all, and none with as high a reputation (and as big a name made for himself) as Geiszler. Certainly none who’d be as thick enough to advertise himself as something as foolish as _The Doctor of the Great Unknown_ , anyway. It wasn’t too hard for Hermann to bribe his way backstage into Geiszler’s shabby-looking dressing room at tonight’s theater to receive an isolated and uninterrupted audience with the man, either. (A couple shillings, here and there, passed over discreetly to the right people.)

Geiszler, washing his hands in a water basin, does not turn to face Hermann, and remains largely unbothered by his outburst. “Hello to you too, old friend,” he says over his shoulder, and then forgoes a towel and merely dries his hands on his emerald-colored breeches. He’s grinning when he turns to face Hermann. “You didn’t have to sneak about, you know. I would’ve been happy to just let you in if you’d only asked. How’d you find me?”

Geiszler is much the same as he’d been all those years ago, on the occasion of their ill-fated meeting: breeches and waistcoat indecently tight, shirt half-untucked and half-unbuttoned (allowing Hermann a glimpse of his inked chest), cravat (the same emerald shade of his breeches, far too gaudy) loose, one lens of his oversized eyeglasses cracked at the very corner. Obnoxious American accent. Messy hair. Distractingly charming smile. Freckles—well. Hermann clears his throat and bristles. “Your advertisements,” he says, and whips a crumpled and creased page from the pocket of his heavy overcoat. It’d been passed to him in the streets by one of Geiszler’s hired cohorts nearly three months prior. “It’s _quite_ a good likeness, I must say.”

It really is: whoever’d sketched Geiszler’s face out had captured the curl of his lips, the softness of his cheeks, the glint of his eyes perfectly.

(Hermann cannot help but wonder if no small part of Geiszler’s success is due to mere aesthetic appeal.)

Geiszler takes the advertisement from him and looks it over with a laugh. “They’ve made my nose far too slim,” he declares after a moment, and tosses it onto his dressing table without a second look. He does look at Hermann, though, up and down the length of his body, long, and lingering, and far more suggestive than a normal social call should entail. Hermann is thankful the low candlelight hides his blush. “Have you come for the show, Hermann?”

“I have not, _Dr. Geiszler_.”

“Ah, come on,” Geiszler says, grin widening. “We’re well beyond formalities.”

Their first meeting had gone poorly. The handful of hours following—before they parted in an embarrassed huff—spent in the confines of Hermann’s private rooms at the Gottlieb family estate, and culminating from a healthy amount of gin and a less-than-healthy amount of shouting, did not. They were far beyond formalities even before that, however, and Hermann feels it’s perhaps owed to his old friend now. Colleague. His old colleague. “Newton,” he relents. “And no—I have _not_ come for your mockery of a show.” As if he’d travel all the way from the countryside for that.

“Have you come to expose me, then?” Newton says, sounding increasingly delighted with every word. “As the _fraud_ I am? Put those great scientific powers to use on me?”

Newton always had a dreadfully well-tuned ability to discern Hermann’s thought process during their correspondence; he has not lost it, it seems, even five years down the line. “Well,” Hermann says, “er, yes, I suppose—”

“Wonderful,” Newton says. He fishes out a small ticket from the inside of his waistcoat (floral, as gaudy as the rest of him) and flourishes it proudly at Hermann. “A front-row seat reserved just for you, Doctor.”

_Dr. Hermann Gottlieb_ is scrawled, neatly, and in Newton’s handwriting, across the top of the ticket. Hermann blanches. For a moment, he allows superstition to get the better of him, his imagination to run wild. “How did you know I’d be—?”

Newton waggles his eyebrows and taps his temple with his index finger. “The Doctor of the Great Unknown does not reveal his secrets that easily.”

Hermann narrows his eyes, but snatches the ticket up anyway. “ _Thank_ you,” he says.

Newton watches him tuck it into his own waistcoat pocket, far too self-satisfied for Hermann’s liking. “Good luck,” he says, breezily.

“You as well,” Hermann says.

 

It’d been drizzling gently when Hermann found his way to the theater some half-hour earlier, but the storm has picked up noticeably since, and rain drums heavily on the roof overhead. The perfect atmosphere for Newton’s absurd production. Hermann would not be surprised if he planned it as such. The man himself is as charmingly disheveled as ever when he steps out into the low-lit stage, and he takes a bow to resounding applause and cheers. Then he takes a few more bows. (Newton’s always loved attention.) Hermann claps along, though far more sarcastically than those around him, and he barely manages to suppress an eyeroll at the silence that falls, instantly, across the crowd when Newton raises a single hand. “Welcome, all of you,” Newton begins, solemnly. “I look forward to being your guide through the spirit world once more.”

A clap of thunder overhead: the audience jump in their seats. Hermann does not bother hiding his eyeroll this time.

Newton’s act follows as, Hermann presumes, they usually tend to. He spouts some more nonsense about the spirit world, about _the veil between life and death_ being thin tonight. A second curtain is pulled aside to reveal a small round table, draped in a red tablecloth that touches the floor, and set up with several unlit candles and (here, Hermann sits up straighter) what he recognizes on sight as an Ouija board. Newton requests several audience volunteers. All very rehearsed. All very methodical.

A distraught-looking young woman raises her hand first, then an equally-distraught young man who appears to be her companion. Newton selects them both. Then— “How about you, sir?” Newton says, loudly, pointing at Hermann.

All eyes swivel in Hermann’s direction. Newton winks at him. “I’d rather not—” Hermann begins, but Newton shakes his head.

“The spirits have selected you,” he declares, pitching his voice low and ominous.

A whisper among the crowd. The young man to Hermann’s right leans, subtly, away from Hermann’s seat. Hermann grits his teeth. “Alright,” he says, and grasping his cane, rises to his feet.

The young woman and her companion have already seated themselves at the small table by the time Hermann takes the fourth, and final, seat, and Newton is lighting each candle—tall, and pearl-white—with a long matchstick. “You’ve suffered a great loss recently, haven’t you?” Newton says to the young woman, loud enough that the audience can hear; the seating of the theater is staggered at an incline, so that they’re within perfect view as well. The young woman nods, and dabs at her eye with an embroidered handkerchief. Newton looks to the man, next. “You both have.”

The man nods. “Our mother,” he says.

Newton frowns, and reaches out and pats his hand tenderly. The portrait of pure sympathy. “We’ll need to hold hands for this,” Newton says to the rest of them. “All of us, together.”

Newton takes the young man’s hand; the young man takes his sister’s; Hermann refuses to take either hers or Newton’s until he feels a very sharp jab at his ankle with something that feels, suspiciously, like the toe of Newton’s worn leather boots. “Dr. Gottlieb, please,” Newton says, as solemn as he’d been when he’d selected Hermann as a volunteer. The young man startles, presumably mistaking Newton’s knowing Hermann’s name for some otherworldly clairvoyance. “If you don’t complete the circle, the spirits won’t communicate with us.”

He shakes his hand at Hermann. Hermann heaves a great sigh and takes it, then takes the young woman’s as well. Newton smiles at him. “Thank you,” he says. He shuts his eyes and tilts his head towards the heavens, and when he speaks again, he’s pitched his voice high. “Spirits,” he calls, appearing to be in deep concentration, “are you with us?”

For a moment, nothing happens. Hermann wonders if Newton’s about to start speaking in affected tongues, or Latin (which Hermann knows he’s rubbish at), or something equally _atmospheric._

Then the planchette on the board moves, untouched, to _Hello_.

Quiet gasps throughout the crowd. The brother and sister both startle, staring between the board, from each other, to Newton. Hermann, meanwhile, narrows his eyes at Newton. It moved untouched only by _appearance_. Newton’s hands are preoccupied, but that does not rule out wires. One attached to a finger, perhaps. To his knee. An ankle.

An ankle that is, suddenly, pressing itself to Hermann’s own.

Hermann startles nearly as bad as the siblings had, but Newton continues his grandiose show as if nothing is amiss. “We seek the spirit of—“

“Faye,” the sister supplies quickly.

“Faye,” Newton repeats. “Are you with us, Faye?”

The flame of each candle stutters: fog begins to rise, seemingly from the ground itself. The planchette slides to _yes_.

Newton’s ankle, meanwhile, slides to Hermann’s calf.

“Mother?” the young man calls out.

The flames flicker more violently than before. Thunder rumbles overhead. Newton opens his eyes. “She’s with us,” he tells the siblings. He smiles encouragingly. “You may ask her whatever you’d like.”

The storm is a stroke of luck, or perhaps the result of a barometer and meticulous planning on Newton’s part; the fog, likely dry ice placed strategically below the stage; the candles, the result of a draft; Newton’s answers to the siblings’ questions they pose to their departed mother, what they either obviously want to hear or so general there’s no room for error. The planchette—Hermann cannot decide exactly how Newton does it. He _means_ to detect, exactly, how it is that Newton may move it, without so much of a twitch of a hand, in sweeping arcs across the board, letter to letter, to spell out each answer. But Newton’s boot is rubbing, steadily, at Hermann’s clothed leg, and the thumb of the hand he’s got wrapped around Hermann’s has begun stroking (so very carefully) across Hermann’s knuckles, and every single coherent thought Hermann may have had has long since fled and been replaced with a low, thrumming, exciting static. He raises his eyes to Newton’s, meaning to glare, but the leer Newton casts him in return (planchette never once halting) is so heated Hermann feels a shiver ripple up his spine.

(Hermann is thrust, at once, back to the evening he spent in his rooms with Newton five years prior, to the heat of Newton’s hungry kisses, to the clever ministrations of Newton’s fingers, to the soft lines of his body moving, moving against Hermann, and finds himself suddenly short-of-breath and uncomfortably  _hot_ under his stiff collar.)

Hermann wets his lips. Against his better judgment, he presses his own ankle back. Newton winks again.

A moment later, he tears his eyes away from Hermann fully and shuts them quick. “I can feel her spirit fading,” he announces. The fog begins to dissipate. The candlelight dims. “You should say goodbye.”

The siblings do, tearfully, and the planchette slides—unaided, by all accounts—to _Goodbye,_ and the candles flicker out entirely. Newton drops their hands and motions for them all to do the same; his boot recedes from Hermann’s leg with one final stroke across his ankle, leaving Hermann strangely bereft.

Hermann still feels the heat of Newton’s palm as he and the young siblings are ushered back to their seats, as Newton takes his bows to more thunderous applause and promises—at his _next_ show (for the reasonable, considering, price of three shillings)—to conjure up real and tangible specters to the stage. Buy your tickets in advance today!

Newton—cravat undone entirely, hands shoved carelessly into his pockets—is waiting for Hermann under the gaslight at the theater’s back exit by the time Hermann manages to push his way through the eager, clambering throngs of patrons and out onto the wet streets. Snuck out, Hermann presumes, immediately after his final encore bow. He smiles a touch teasingly when he sees Hermann. “Well, _Dr. Gottlieb_ ,” he says, “how’d the investigation go?”

The rain’s turned into a light mist, almost eerie in the pitch-dark of the evening. Hermann glances around to ascertain they’re not in any immediate danger of being stumbled upon before he grips Newton by the front of his waistcoat with one hand, shoves him against the filthy brick wall, and presses a long, hard kiss to that _infuriating_ mouth. Newton’s eyes are wide as anything when Hermann reels back. “You’re a right bastard,” Hermann declares.

Newton recovers quickly. “Poorly, then, I take it?”

“Wires,” Hermann spits. “String.”

“Nope and nope,” Newton says. His grin returns. “Don’t strain yourself, doctor.”

“A right bastard,” Hermann repeats, scowling, “and a bloody _cheat_.”

“A _cheat_?” Newton laughs. “It’s hardly my fault you’re easily distracted.” He merely laughs again in the face of Hermann’s deepening scowl. “Ah, come on, lighten up. Would you like to have dinner with me?”

“I’ve already eaten,” Hermann says shortly. He has, actually: the innkeeper of Hermann’s temporary lodgings forced stew upon him before he headed out to confront Newton, proclaiming him to be too skinny. He’s not quite sure he fancies a dinner in public with Newton, anyway. Newton does not exactly possess a sense of decorum. One of the many reasons they'd quarreled in the first place.

“Not even if I have it sent to my rooms?” Newton tries again. Hermann shakes his head. “A drink, then?”

“I’m not thirsty,” Hermann says.

“Good _God_ , Hermann,” Newton sighs, half-exasperated, half-amused. “Do you or do you not want to go to bed with me?”

_Oh_. Startled, heat rising to his face, Hermann takes a brief moment to recover. He does want, actually, very much. “You could’ve just said, rather than—”

“Well, I didn’t think I’d have to spell it out for you, did I?” Newton cuts in.

Hermann sniffs. After a bit more consideration, he presents his left arm; Newton slips forward quickly, and eagerly, and takes it with his right, resting the hand of his left on top of it. “Yes,” Hermann says, tersely. “I would like to.”

He has missed Newton very badly.

Newton ghosts a small kiss over his cheek, and Hermann cannot help the way his lips curl up. “It’s hardly a walk,” Newton says, steering them in the proper direction to exit the alleyway, Hermann’s cane clacking along the cobblestone. “Ten minutes, maybe. I s’pose we could hire a carriage, but—”

“I don’t mind the walk,” Hermann says, as the night air always does him good. Then, because they’re still hidden in shadows, because there are no prying eyes about, and because Hermann feels _bold,_ he steals another brief kiss from Newton’s lips and relishes in the drag of Newton’s stubble. “How did you know to save me a seat?” he says, as an afterthought.

Newton smiles. “I always set one aside for you, every show,” he says. “Just in case.”

The admission sends a strange flare of warmth through Hermann’s chest. Damn Newton. “I _will_ find out how you’re moving the planchette,” he warns, perhaps if only to remind himself of the whole point of the evening. Newton’s done a fairly spectacular job of distracting him. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten.” Perhaps he can poke around through Newton's things once they've finished—well—and Newton has fallen asleep.

“Oh, I’m _sure_ ,” Newton says. He points ahead. “It’s a left up here.”

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: hermannsthumb, twitter: hermanngaylieb, nsfw twitter (where i linked this, and other stuff, originally): hermanngayszler


End file.
